Tuesday, January 13, 2015

How Trans Mountain Project Will Pump Profits to Its Texas Owners

True journalism requires tireless hours of investigation, a disciplined mind that can separate fact from story, a dedication to one's profession that cannot be bought or traded and people who devote their lives to the profession. Sadly, I have noted that with the massive cuts in funding to the mainstream press, more and more of our stories on news events are read from untrained writers. Blogs, pseudo-news outlets and pure infotainment outlets masquerading as press (such as Fox News) have turned professional journalism into a rare commodity. Any true democracy requires an impartial, well trained and fully funded independent press to keep those in power honest. These journalists must force truths, question statements and seek the answers that lie beneath the rhetoric dumped on to society by an assuming leadership.

I recently encountered one such example of a journalist who seeks the truth behind the masquerade. Robyn Allen of the Tyee has worked hard to trace the trail of money behind Kinder Morgan. She has turned over many stones in her quest to find the facts and read behind the accounting statements. I would encourage anyone who is interested in seeking the truths in this matter to give the story below a read and share it with others.

"U.S.-based Kinder Morgan says its Trans Mountain expansion project represents financial and economic benefit to the Canadian economy, and our federal and provincial public treasuries.
Who would spend a year investigating such claims, rooted as they are in complex tax law, regulations and corporate structure? I did.
What I found made me conclude the opposite -- Kinder Morgan drains financial wealth from our economy and does not pay its fair share of taxes.
I have written about the project's complicated design to yield meagre tax revenues for Canadians in a previous Tyee article.
Now let me examine just how Canadian Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. is. The answer: hardly at all."

IT is an interesting read of Richard Kinder and William Morgan, two former Enron executives who run what appears on the face to be a Canadian company. When we hear of Kinder Morgan as a company caring for it's fellow Canadian's financial well being, we must balance this out with the fact that the two former Enron executives are both natives of the US, not Canada. Who's best interests? I can only guess it might not be mine.

You will recall Enron as the single largest house of cards in US history. It was a fraud on a massive scale. Tax avoidance, fictitious profits, creative accounting and storytelling on a scale never before seen were just some of the ingredients of Enron. Now, we Canadians have to ask ourselves if we trust the same individuals to keep our best interests in mind. Guess where I set on the matter.

Please support Robyn and others like her who keep real journalism alive.

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